Blog: July 2008 Archives

I truly thought that after I posted that my hosting services had finally been restored that this would be an end to this never ending saga. I expected that the servers had to be bullet proof and I would not be seeing any more outages. I was of course temporarily delusional as I expected that IX Web Hosting would be about to maintain their hardware. On Monday of this week my sites again incurred an outage of nearly an hour. I went back to the problem ticket center and entered a ticket and followed up with a visit to the online chat. I was told that the server was having communications issues and that the administrators were aware of it. I asked for an estimated time this would be resolved but the chat host never returned to answer my question. I can only assume that he fell over dead and was laying there waiting for medical personnel to appear to remove the body. After the outage and services were restored I noticed strange behavior with regards to my blogs. Prior to the outage I was able to post entries and have those entries broadcast to several of the micro-blogging services including Twitter and Plurk. Now though that functionality was not working. After a quick troubleshooting session I realized that IX Web Hosting had somehow removed or uninstalled two PERL modules. I went back out to the web and opened yet another problem ticket requesting that these modules be added back to the server. That request occurred on Tuesday. Here it is Friday and the modules are still not installed and there is no timeline of when these might be completed. This is pretty much the end of my patience and I decided that I need to finally change hosting providers.

For the last eight days I have been fighting with my web hosting company trying to get them to restore my site connectivity after they had a hardware failure. For the first few days I had absolutely no connectivity whatsoever and was completely dead in the water. I spent nearly every waking hour working with them to try and get someone to take ownership of this problem and resolve it. Finally after several days of being down I requested that they move me to a new server so I could begin restoring things myself. They relented and moved my. Unfortunately they did not properly install the software nor load the PERL modules necessary for me to be up. It has been one of the most frustrating experiences of my life and I had come to the conclusion that I needed to find a new hosting provider.

Well it is July 3. It has been 4 days since my shared web host went down leaving my sites down and unavailable. It has been 2 days since a new server was configured partially restoring my web presence. As you know from previous entries the server was misconfigured when it was created and IX Web Hosting failed to load two simple PERL modules for connectivity to MySQL and to SendMail. These are not some obscure module that only I would use; these are standard modules that pretty much everyone on the planet would expect to have loaded. I have been working with the "technical support" personnel for IX Web Hosting to get these modules installed to restore my sites to full working order. There are three ways for you to contact IX Web Hosting technical support. There is phone support, live chat, and by entering a problem ticket.

Yesterday I ranted about IX Web Hosting and how I had been down for days while they attempted to try and resolve a hardware problem they were having. Late last evening after the Diamondbacks game I arrived home to find that the sites were still unavailable. I again reached out to technical support at IX Web Hosting to get a status. I was told that my sites would be restored "very soon". Since "very soon" had encompassed 3 days so far I wasn't real confident that I would be up any time during this millennium. I expressed my frustration and asked if I could please be moved to a different server. Even if I had to recreate all of my sites myself it would be better than looking at an error screen. The technician was shocked that I would want to move servers since this one was being repaired and would be available shortly. Yeah he should come and hang out on my end and see what it is like.

I have previously lamented about my struggles with IX Web Hosting who I am currently using. When I wrote in March I explained that there may be a bit of downtime to my sites due to being moved to a new server. My sites had to be migrated because the server was still using some very dated software and I needed something that was actually published this century. The server migration went fairly well or so I thought. As I started to dig into the configuration I found modules missing that made my blog unavailable. This was a simple problem but it took IX Web Hosting a week to get things straightened out. Finally I was back up and I tried to forget the problems I had had.